Op-Ed: WhereBerry joins busy social networking space

With a vast list of social networking media sites, do we really need another one? If it makes a difference, then sure! So how about a social network for making future plans? Who knew?

Are you so sick of friends’ comments on Facebook, posting each and every move that they make, places that they go, foods that they eat, or even unnecessary intimate activities that they engage in that are labeled TMI, as in too much information. Well! Sorry, but the solution to those annoying minute by minute ‘every breath I take’ Facebook updates have yet to be resolved. Instead, amongst us is a new social networking platform that may or may not annoy us. Yesterday's Tuesday, May 17th 2011, was the launching of WhereBerry, a new one. It is meant for sharing what you want to do in the future. In that way, WhereBerry is not like the other social networking services like Facebook, FourSquare and Twitter, which are mostly for sharing what you have done in the past and what you are doing at the moment.

On WhereBerry, people post activities that they want to do tomorrow, in a few days or someday in the future. Let us say for instance, a restaurant that they want to dine in for a date night, a movie premiere that they hope to see with a group of friends, or a charity event that they plan to participate. While all of those are being planned, friends on WhereBerry can comment and recommend. Cool! Huh?

Do not think that WhereBerry is yet another Facebook killer or wannabe. In fact, the two go hand in hand together. With your existing Facebook log-in account, you can log in to WhereBerry’s website, WhereBerry.com. Once logged in, you will see your WhereBerry feed, which has postings from any of your Facebook friends who are of course also on WhereBerry. However, according to The New York Times Technology report, entries on WhereBerry are also public, so other members could steal your ideas. Whether a planned itinerary of a walkathon event, or how to locate a very important person who can easily let one inside a hard-to-get-in hip bar, no matter how uniquely great your idea posts are, they are out there in public for the taking. Do you think it’s still cool?

Nick Baum and Bill Ferrel are former Google engineers who are now the founders of WhereBerry. “We’re giving people a single place for all these ideas that float around for people to do. If you put them here, you won’t forget about them and the combination of things will make you do a lot more stuff,” Nick Baum said.

The company’s focus is not monetary, not yet anyway. Not until it has more users. Nick Baum said, “I saw the site as a natural place for advertisers to find people who have already expressed interest in their businesses. A restaurant that needs to fill seats midweek, for instance, could offer a discount to a group of people who have said on WhereBerry that they want to eat there.”

“WhereBerry might offer tools to cull friend groups in the future, but that the model works for now because WhereBerry is just for discussing plans, not necessarily for committing to getting together. The reason we’re taking this direction is because we think this kind of information, the restaurants you want to go to, the movies you want to see, isn’t super-sensitive. And we think the benefit of spreading it broadly is you don’t know which of your friends are interested in going with you,” Mr. Baum added.

This is very cliché to say, but for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if WhereBerry can survive in an already cramped pool of social networking sites. But since WhereBerry is wisely complementary to Facebook, who knows? It might just have its chance to thrive in the social networking jungle. Facebook, being the pioneer in social networking, one should work with it and not against it.

This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com